Tactile sensors based on electrical resistance tomography (ERT) provide pressure sensing over a large area using only a few electrodes, which is a promising property for robotic tactile skin. Most ERT-based tactile sensors employ electrodes only on the sensor’s edge to avoid undesirable artifacts caused by electrode contact. The distribution of these electrodes is critical, as electrode location largely determines the sensitive regions, but only a few studies have positioned electrodes in the sensor’s central region to improve the sensitivity. Establishing the use of internal electrodes on a stretchable textile needs further investigation into piezoresistive structure fabrication, measurement strategy, and calibration. This article presents a comprehensive study of an ERT-based tactile sensor with distributed electrodes. We describe key fabrication details of a layered textile-based piezoresistive structure, an iterative method for choosing the current injection pathways that yields pairwise optimal patterns, and a calibration process to account for the spatially varying sensitivity of such sensors. We demonstrate two sample sensors with electrodes located only on the boundary or distributed across the surface, and we evaluate their performance via three methods widely used to test tactile sensing in biological systems: single-point localization, two-point discrimination, and contact force estimation.

基于电阻断层扫描 (ERT) 的触觉传感器仅使用几个电极即可在大面积上提供压力感测，这是机器人触觉皮肤的一个很有前途的特性。大多数基于 ERT 的触觉传感器仅在传感器的边缘使用电极，以避免由电极接触引起的不良伪影。这些电极的分布至关重要，因为电极位置在很大程度上决定了敏感区域，但只有少数研究将电极放置在传感器的中心区域以提高灵敏度。在可拉伸纺织品上建立内部电极的使用需要进一步研究压阻结构制造、测量策略和校准。本文对具有分布式电极的基于 ERT 的触觉传感器进行了全面研究。我们描述了基于分层纺织品的压阻结构的关键制造细节、一种用于选择产生成对最佳模式的电流注入路径的迭代方法，以及一种校准过程，以说明此类传感器的空间变化灵敏度。我们展示了两个电极仅位于边界上或分布在表面上的样本传感器，我们通过三种广泛用于测试生物系统触觉感知的方法来评估它们的性能：单点定位、两点辨别和接触力估计.